#citizenweb3 Episode link: https://www.citizenweb3.com/secret-nodes Episode name: Explorers, privacy and nodes with Ian and Jacob Anna: Hey, it's Citizen Cosmos. We're Serge and Anna and we discover cosmos by chatting with awesome people from various teams and community. Join us if you're curious how dreams and ambitions become code. Citizen Web3: Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Citizen Cosmos. And today we actually have a somewhat of a special episode. First of all, we have two guests and not one, which is double the pleasure. Second thing, I guess it's the first time we're going to interview validators outside of the Cosmos Hub. And Ian and Jacob, the creators of the Puzzle Report Blockchain Explorer. They also, like I said, they help to secure a network, which is a secret network outside of the Cosmos Hub in the greater cosmos community. And really excited to have you on the show, guys. Hi. Ian: Hey, great to be here. Jacab: Thanks for having us. Hey. Citizen Web3: Thanks for joining. How are you guys? How is whatever geographically you at? How's the sunshine? Jacab: It's great. I'm in Southern California, so it's always sunny here. Citizen Web3: Cool. Ian: And I'm out in Nevada and not bad out here. Not a bad place to hold up for the apocalypse. Citizen Web3: I guess Nevada is a really good place to wait the apocalypse, right? I mean, it's kind of like the place where you would want to be when the apocalypse starts. Ian: Absolutely. Citizen Web3: Cool, guys. I'm really glad to hear that you're in a good mood. Let's jump into what you guys do straight away. And the first question we have is the obvious question. Just a brief introduction in your own words. What you guys do. How did you come to do what you do and whatever else you want to share? So just like a brief intro. Ian: I'm Ian Dixon. I got into cryptocurrency in 2011 through mining Bitcoin. I read it. And I think it was either wired or something like wired article on people using graphics cards to mine magic internet money. And I thought it'd be interesting to learn more about the scam. And then it turned out to not be a scam. So it's been an interesting journey since then. Jacab: I'm Jacab Jetson. I actually got into crypto through Ian. We didn't go to high school together. We grew up in the same town in South Dakota. So right around 2017, he was telling me about Ethereum. I think he's the first one that he got me into and got me into Indigma, which has now become the secret network. But it was kind of the precursor to the secret network in a sense. And so earlier this year, he asked me if I had any interest in helping him build a block explorer for this new blockchain. And we had just started quarantine in California. And I was spending my day working at my regular job and playing video games. So I was like, yeah, that sounds a way more productive use of my time than call of duty for eight hours a day. Citizen Web3: Guys, you sound like the first of all normal typical pair of blockchain djinns. You know, that's the best word to describe us now. I totally feel what you guys say in 2011's scam. I like the way Ian waited three years before telling Jacob that there is some crypto thing. He started on 11, but Ethereum came in 14. So he was like, I'll wait for three years. Let's see what's going on there. Now, I'm obviously kidding. You mentioned Enigma there and also NJ, who set up the interview, who's our new community advocate for Citizen Cosmos, told us that you guys are involved with Enigma and Secret Network. Mind telling why Enigma and Secret Network, why not any other project out there? Why does it attract you in any way? Ian: Essentially, after I got involved in cryptocurrency, initially I was really only interested in Bitcoin. I dabbled a little bit in some of the alts, but there was never really much of another focus for me. And I started following Enigma in 2015. And when 2017 came around, I saw that they were bringing their product market. And really what stood out about Enigma to me is that they were solving a really important privacy problem. I always thought it was kind of strange that there was no privacy on blockchains. And for the longest time, it wasn't really possible to have any kind of good privacy that was lasting on blockchain. So that kind of really struck a chord with me. I'm a privacy advocate, so we just kept pursuing it pretty much. Jacab: I was just going to say, yeah, really the privacy aspect was the big thing for me as well. Ian had initially started talking to me about how all these major tech companies are selling our data and that we should actually be concerned about that. And this was back in like 2014, 2015, whenever Google's motto was still do no evil. And I was like, oh, no, we can trust them. Yeah, obviously that was a mistake. And we were very naive to trust them at all. But anyways, Anna: could you tell us a little bit more about privacy aspects? How that idea starts when you just once thinking, OK, my privacy is super important thing for me. Or you discover that someone talk about privacy and how the modern internet can broken this concept that your data belongs to you. So tell us the story. Ian: I guess what I should really say is how I kind of became a privacy advocate. You know, if you look back before the internet came out, I think we all had privacy before the internet came out. Pretty good privacy, at least. And slowly, based on these business models that became successful in the early days of the internet, people have unknowingly at first really given away a lot of the privacy that they inherently had before. The default just became give us all your data. We're going to own it. You have no control over it and you can't use our product if you don't agree. So this trend towards this vast openness of accessibility to people's information kind of degraded like this base level of privacy people had that they didn't even necessarily ask for right away. And I had said before when I got involved in Bitcoin, I did think one of the strangest things was that there was just no privacy. And this seemed a step backwards kind of public blockchains. I love public blockchains, but how they came out initially kind of seems a step backwards because it essentially does the same thing that the traditional mega big companies on the internet do today. They say, give up all your privacy in order to use this. I mean, that's kind of what Bitcoin does. I love all the positive things about it. But when I was thinking about how is this going to actually get adopted and stuff, it doesn't get adopted by asking corporations to give up all the data and make it public and their trade positions and all of that stuff. That's not how blockchain scales. So focusing on privacy seemed to be really the key to actually getting this stuff adopted by entities that will make it matter far more than it does today. Jacab: Yeah, I think that the example that a lot of people in the secret network always use whenever we're talking about why blockchains need to have privacy and why you need private computations is let's say that you're going to build a decentralized Uber or some other application that would have your address or this personal data about you. You wouldn't want everyone in the world to be able to see that data and see one where you're going, where you're coming from and where your home address is. So why would you want to build an app like that on a blockchain where all that is public to everyone to be able to see? Anna: Great example with Uber. I never thought about it in that field because Uber is very obvious. You provide a lot of data where you go, where you leave, where you work. So cool. Citizen Web3: And Uber is the next Google Na I'm kidding. no I hope you do that. Anna: Oh, actually. Citizen Web3: Yes, actually. actually. there is Anna: It's close to be the next Google. yeah Citizen Web3: I think it was Ian who mentioned, yeah, yeah, you started the story with Bitcoin. So if we look at the evolution of whatever of the blockchain space or the blockchain projects, and especially with regards to privacy, and at first we had an issue in all days with pre-mines and devs were trying to hide coins here. There's a lot of stories, and I'm sure like Ian, especially you, from 2011, you know a lot of them. Then there was the more recent kind of history. I mean, it's only been 12 years, but for the blockchain space, it sounds like centuries. And the more recent history, the bigger problem, at least to me, was the failing promises with regards to the ICO boom and projects coming and saying, all right, we're going to build a private blockchain. We know what we're doing. We're going to, like Jacob mentioned, hide our computations or make them private or whatever right. And essentially turned out that, well, no one really achieved it. No one really did to a really full extent. What's in your opinion, has the space been progressing? Has the blockchain space been changing? And if so, if it has been progressing, hasn't been doing it towards privacy or away from privacy? Ian: I suppose I would say they've at least started to talk about the importance of privacy, but the bulk of the blockchain space hasn't moved towards it. And it would make sense that would be the case, because most projects aren't actually building the privacy technologies. And then when it comes to how many have spoken about solving these types of problems, from my perspective, it looks like most entities working on those problems have taken the most expensive approach, expensive meaning like gas costs and stuff like that. And those approaches have a lot of friction. It seems the secret network is pretty much the one that took an actual usable approach as a first step. I think over time, the larger conversation around privacy is going to take off. And these things will become more known as being important. But I really what I think is kind of holding back the privacy part in the space is that there still hasn't been that like inflection point around privacy. We need to move on it now as a whole. There are entities in it, in the space that are working on it, but as a whole, it just hasn't happened quite yet. This is what we need to focus on in order to get the next 100, 500, thousands of companies to start using these technologies more. Citizen Web3: You mentioned expensive, and that's a very important, in my opinion, statement when we talk about blockchains in general. And we had Tor on the show and Tor is the CEO of Secret Network, of course, and the founder of Secret Network. We spoke about it, and the point I'm getting here is the way I see it, there is a huge gap between cost and trustless and trusted solutions. And a lot of the trustless solutions tend to be more expensive. Now, when we talk about privacy, in your opinion, should we say, okay, let's go for as private as we can, regardless of whether it's a trust or a trustless setup? Or shall we say, okay, privacy is so important, we need the most trustless setup that we can get, that we can trust, and doesn't matter how much it costs. Where is the balance between keeping things decentralized and keeping the costs somewhat balanced to the solution itself? Ian: I ultimately think users won't use privacy solutions that are too expensive. I haven't looked at this recently, so forgive me if I'm wrong on the ranges here, but on Ethereum, I remember that they added the ability to do some sort of private transaction type last year, I believe, in 2019. But it's experimental and it costs like a million gas or something, some ridiculously high number. And I've really seen no popular end user dapps utilize that. And I know that there's advancements being made with rollups and snarks and starks and etc. But it's still a more expensive approach for the moment. I just don't think people are going to use it if it's too expensive. I do see it in acknowledge that it's getting less expensive though. I think that answers your question probably. I just don't think it'll be used if it's too expensive. It doesn't matter if you're wealthy enough, I suppose sure. You'll, like if it's a big enough transaction or whatever, like sure pay, X amount of gas or whatever to have it be private. But outside of that, it's not going to be widely used. Citizen Web3: Jacob, what about you? Do you have any thoughts on it? Jacab: Yeah, I would agree that for sure if it's prohibitively expensive, then people aren't going to use it. But I would say that if it costs marginally more to where it's a little bit more expensive, I do think that there's a lot of people that will go for something that is slightly more expensive than a trust and solution if it is trustless. Because again, like I was saying about the corporations that we thought we could trust with our data in the mid 2010s era, a lot of that has proven to be false. And so it's kind of like, okay, well, who do we really trust? And can we ensure that they're not going to do something that would go against our desires in the future? So yeah, I mean, if it's like Ian said, a million gas to a private transaction, that's absolutely not feasible in my opinion. But if it's marginally more expensive, then I think that probably the trustless solution is going to win out. Citizen Web3: I have a very silly question that I think everybody who enters this space, and I don't think it's just to do with blockchain. I think it's the general, they have that question. What is privacy? Especially what does it mean for the general crypto user or for Cosmos user of a secret network user? Why should he care about? I mean, you mentioned the data and people hear that, right? And I mean, I know exactly what you're saying, but I want to talk this out. I think it's important for people to hear this because a lot of people maybe understand the whole data thing and Cambridge Analytica and whatever the whole like story. But why should the average person give a shit and spend a million or half a million or 100,000 way on transaction that is private? What does it mean for him? Ian: I think the easiest example to give is with a dex trade. A lot of people are using things like swap and dexes in general. And if somebody has a large enough position and an opportunity opens up because it hasn't been executed yet, the ability to see what trade that person is trying to make enables you to try to front run it. In the trading world for advanced traders, I think they all recognize that it's pretty crazy that they can manipulate their position or whatever can be manipulated like that. So actually, I guess that's an advanced one. But a more basic one is I remember looking at Bitcoin Block Explorers when I first got involved in crypto. And I just remember thinking how crazy it was that people could see how much I sent where. And I don't think that the average person is just okay with that. I think that's just what they saw when they got involved. If I would have saw that when I opened my bank account, I would have said, hell no to the bank. This feature doesn't work for me. People can see my inputs and outputs. On a blockchain, we make certain tradeoffs because it's a system that well, ideally doesn't have a central point of failure like a central bank or something. So I think people will care if it's convenient enough. Well, I think people care right now, but I think people will really demand it more if it's cheap and convenient enough. And they start to get to have some basic level of privacy. Jacab: I would agree with that. And to Ian's point about being able to see every transaction right when Bitcoin first came out and really for a good amount of its history, people thought that Bitcoin transactions couldn't really be traced back to you because it doesn't have any of your identifying information connected with your address. But obviously we're seeing now that the feds have been able to track down people using it on like the Silk Road and other places like that. And so clearly this assumption of anonymity was not correct at the time and it still isn't correct. And unless you really do have something that can hide exactly what you're doing, I do think that it's important for people to be able to have ownership over their data and be able to decide what they do with it. I think that a lot of the issues we've run into with things like Cambridge Analytica and with YouTube sending people down rabbit holes is due to these corporations having control over our data and being able to basically manipulate people into believing something that the algorithm wants them to believe or that they think they'll like. I don't know. I think that it's important for us to fight against that sort of thing. Anna: Does it mean that the average person who decided to do something in crypto space should be more responsible and more thinking about what is possible to do and what is prohibited and what is the best way to avoid something? Yeah, just to take care of the privacy itself because no regulations who will take care of them. And how you feel that balance between paternalistic system that we see now and the freedom of using cryptocurrencies? Ian: My default answer is that I feel like it's all of our responsibilities to really make sure we're secure and private on the internet. But I really don't think the average person is going to jump through many hoops for privacy. It needs to be something that the developers are adding to protocols really in my opinion. It needs to be cheap and easy. Otherwise people won't do it. And what Jacob said is totally true on the assumption of privacy. People use, to this day, people still use cryptocurrencies and they just assume it's synonymous, but it's not. There are companies that are building massive data sets on these addresses. They're sharing between different sources like who owns what address, they're exchanging information like that. And there's going to be fewer and fewer defenses against it unless people unless the protocol engineers pretty much essentially start implementing privacy solutions. That's really the only solution. Otherwise, even when I use Bitcoin, I'll sacrifice my privacy to an extent just to use it or Ethereum. But if that's still the case five to ten years from now, then I'll be pretty disappointed. Jacab: Yeah, I would agree with that. And I do think that it is going to be more on the developers to build this stuff in and have an incentive to build privacy into whatever solutions they're building on top of blockchain. And really the end user isn't going to, for the most part, isn't going to know enough or care enough about privacy. But we, I think, have a responsibility to our end users to make sure that that data does stay private and to care even when they might not. Initially, because I do think it's something where you don't care today, but then years down the line, you're like, man, I really wish I would have care about that a little more in hindsight. Citizen Web3: Let's just say I know exactly what you're talking about. I mean, I've done those mistakes and I was just going to say before that I totally respect anyone's views, any cryptocurrency. But Zcash is a totally perfect anti-example here with private transactions that are not there by design. You have to go for a special type of transactions and everybody assumes that private transactions are all of the Zcash's transactions are private. And when in fact it's like under 1% of the transactions are private. And it's a perfect example of what you guys are saying. I mean, it has to be there by design. And another thing that was with regards, why should users care about privacy? And one thing that you guys said was, in a sense, security, in a sense, being safe. Other people not knowing what my transactions are, so they can't interfere with going against it in terms of trades and so on and so forth. And one thing that pops into my mind straight away, I have this report that I happen to sort of keep called privacy basics. It's not like fantastic. It's just me gathering some thoughts every now and every few months. And I noticed that even then, and some people look at it and some people ask me, that there is a huge mix up between privacy and security. People completely overlap them and they don't understand like, do you feel the same way? Do you think that there is a division at those two things, either one entity or they two separate entities? Ian: Personally, I think they're hyper connected, especially when it comes to physical security. If you're a big trader, I'm sure you've seen like the articles or the trend of certain parties on Twitter and people that track transactions. They say how much certain companies are selling or when certain companies get involved in a certain crypto asset. I mean, if you're a big company, maybe that's not a security threat. If you're an individual, maybe you get kidnapped. Citizen Web3: Yeah, I remember in 2017, I worked for CyberFund. A lot of its work was investments into crypto. And one of our biggest questions at one point in 2017, and this was before the hype. This was like a half a year before the big, big hype happened, was like, what do we do with the guy who takes care of the accounting? Where do we hide him? Because he's the point of failure. I mean, as funny as it sounds, but he's like the biggest point of failure for the company because if he gets kidnapped or something like that, we're talking a lot of money. And I mean, this is public numbers. We were talking like millions and millions of dollars and actually tens of millions of dollars. And I mean, what do you do? I mean, you have to have this security in order to be private. I totally see what you're saying. Ian: No, you're good. Another point I was going to make on that is even if you're not a large trader, it's important. We can use the example of taxes. It won't go into how they work in every country, but in some countries, the user is responsible for accurately reporting. They're not told by their government how much they owe right. So in those scenarios, you have to understand a lot of people make mistakes in general. And as an individual, do you want to be in the position where the information needs to be requested? You then comply and hand it over or whatever. Or do you want to be in the situation where anybody on earth can sit there and analyze everything you've ever done and specifically like design software to look for how you made a mistake and go after you for something like that. People make mistakes all the time. So what position do you want to be in? Do you want to be in one that puts you at a disadvantage? Or do you want to be in one that puts you at an advantage? And I'm not talking about evasion. I'm just talking about in general, it's like an open audit for everything you've ever done. What company would agree to that? What individual would opt into that outside of in the crypto space? It's just it puts you at a disadvantage. So nothing malicious, just you either put yourself at a disadvantage or you try to change that dynamic. Jacab: Yeah, I think it gives you more attack surface that somebody can try and attack you on, which is definitely not something that you want. And you know, if you think about a blockchain that's kind of the back end for a some kind of a DAP like Ethereum, then if it's completely open by default, then that's like a company basically saying, oh, yeah, nobody needs to have any kind of API key or anything to access our database. Maybe they won't be able to write anything or change anything, but they can read every single person that we have data on all the data about them. That's something that there is not a single company in the world that would open that up to anyone. Citizen Web3: It's a perfect example, I think. I mean, it's not like it's news to me, but I read this article. Was it two days ago or three days ago? And I don't want to be specific because I'm scared I'm going to get it wrong. But the general idea was that there is now quite a few companies that offer such analytical services, pardon me, for the Bitcoin blockchain. And they basically what they do is people come, they order something, specifically they want to say, want to know who this guy is, what are his transactions, what did he do with his money. And these guys, what they do is they provide the services and it's like, it's crazy. It's not like it's news, but you know, it just gets bigger and bigger with time. Yeah, it's crazy. One last question from my side about privacy. You guys are obviously experts, I mean, you could hear that. And I mean, you're obviously working with it. Which privacy gurus, which resources on the internet would you recommend for us, for our listeners, for anyone to start with, to check out, to read? Ian: Well, I got to show the secret network Discord channel. Guys Zinske is definitely an expert at this stuff. He's, you know, I don't want to speak for him and say something he wouldn't assert, but in my view, it's kind of a large part of his life's work revolves around privacy. And not a lot of people can say that. So, you know, whenever I have questions, I just look to our community really. Jacab: I would say the same for sure. I think the people that are in our community are great resources and there's a lot of really great minds that we've got. Citizen Web3: Going forward to what you actually guys do, we went on secretnotes.org, obviously, and we kind of like looked at what you guys do. So the first question is obvious and down to earth. I mean, would it be safe to say that everything you guys do currently evolves around Enigma and the secret network? Ian: Yes. Jacab: Yeah, absolutely. Citizen Web3: Tell us about the puzzle report. Why did you guys decide to build it? Why did you choose Figments as the example to build it on? Why not dig deeper or whatever else and tell us about the Explorer? Jacab: The reason that we wanted to build an Explorer, one, the secret network didn't really have any dedicated explorers. It had a few that were like spun up just to help give some information, but there weren't any teams that were working on that as their main focus. And we wanted to build an Explorer that would be easily accessible and easy to read and understand for someone who is completely new to the space. But that would also give enough deep analytics tools and enough power and user features to people that were very experienced and wanted to do some really crazy stuff with it. And so the reason that we chose Figment, their Hubble Explorer to kind of fork off of is I'm Ruby on Rails developer by trade and I really prefer using that platform. So Hubble was really the only Ruby on Rails Explorer that we had seen, especially in the Cosmos space. And so it seemed like a really good choice at the time. And it has definitely proven to be one of the cool things about it is that we do have a database so we can store user accounts and let people sign in and have access to their wallets without having to authenticate every single time. We also have the ability to store blockchain data in our database so we can analyze that stuff over time without having to do every single computation every time that somebody visits a page. So that kind of helps speed things up and gives us some more power, I guess, to build those analytical tools. Ian: And to expand on that a little bit, Secret Node Zorg went through a lengthy journey to actually having a product. And when the network originally launched in February, essentially I had to focus 100% on the token swap. I spent a number of years positioning to be able to push forward a product on a live network. And then when the network went live, there was this thing that was the most important thing that we just had to do before pushing any kind of product. And like Jacob said, his skill set is around Ruby on Rails. I'm pretty sure Hubble is the only Ruby on Rails-based explorer out there. I believe that. And before we forked it, no one had ever actually even got it up and running successfully other than Figma. So with us having to focus on the swap, the only way we were going to get a product out at a strategic time, the product that we wanted, which was an explorer, was if we had a foundation to start on. And it was a really excellent foundation to start on. And I mean, Jacob's just been punching away at adding features. I think we've added more features in like the last three months than Figment added in the last three years, at least to if you just look at a singular network that they're supporting, the cosmos features on Hubble have been static for a while now. So it's been really fast for us to be able to build on. Citizen Web3: That raises some questions. So the first one is you speak about secret nodes as an organization. Now, give us a little bit more detail. Who is apart from you and Jacob? Or is it just you two? I'm confused. A little bit more detail. Ian: Right. That makes sense. So before we had the explorer, our only identity was SecretNodesOrg and all of our things, so SecretNodesOrg and PuzzleReport, both fall under SecretLLC, which is our company. And it's just Jacob and I. But SecretNodesOrg was a journey. I mean, Jacob wasn't there the whole time, but there also wasn't a network before Jacob came. Jacab: I got it at the right time for sure. Anna: Complicated story. Ian: So he came definitely at the right time and PuzzleReport isn't about us as a validator. It's an explorer. And we're never going to make PuzzleReport the site or product about us as a validator. The name's on our validator, but that's really the extent. It doesn't have any information about us like SecretNodesOrg has. So we use SecretNodesOrg as that identity spot where we tell people about us. And for the longest time, it was the only place that there was documentation on related to Enigma. When the first test nets were out and stuff, when all the testing happened and people were preparing for SGX, all of the tutorials lived there. And there has been this interesting journey where that has been divested intentionally from where people were going, SecretNodesOrg. And it's essentially moved over to, right now it's moved over to a subdomain on Secret Network. It's learnandbuild.scrt .network. But now, let's say the last stage of the transition is happening and now it's looking like everything is going to move to just scrt.network. Just adapting to lots of fast change. You know how the industry goes. Citizen Web3: I can definitely relate to what you're saying in terms of the validator and the product because with Citizen Cosmos, we have the brand, the validator, which we help with community work, we do this and that, and then there's the podcast. And that's a product which is separate from, it's not a technical product, obviously like an explorer is, but for us, also there is a few other plans that we plan like that. And I totally understand what you mean by that. What are your plans for, I mean, obviously right now when I went on it, it kind of looks like an application. And obviously, Figment does also look like an application, but you kind of, like you mentioned, you went already with features away from it. To me, it actually reminds me, I don't know why when I was on it yesterday. For some reason, I thought it was kind of, I don't know why and it doesn't look like it is kind of, no, it doesn't. But so the question is, what are your plans for it? Are you going the application way? Ian: Definitely, we are trying to position it to become the EtherScan in the Cosmos. And for us to achieve that, we want to match them on the analytics that they show and the transaction page and stuff like that, being able to go through that history. And I know Ethereum works different than Cosmos, especially with upgrades, where you lose the previous chain ID data and etc. etc. But one of the things we did to try to match how on EtherScan, you can go back to the oldest transaction, is we archive all the information from all the chains, even after it upgrades. And we're still working on smoothing out that experience, but we have the data. So now we just need to smooth out the experience on how people can see it. Yeah, analytics and just and surfacing transaction information in a thoughtful, easy to understand way is our focus. When it comes to other chains, we're very interested and we're also hyper ADHD. So we go back and forth all the time in our conversations about it. I think really what we've stuck with, no matter what we've been, what we've said here and there, what we've stuck with is a focus on the secret network for now. And I the next network I would want to support is Cosmos. We just need to make some progress getting the user experience a bit better before we want to dabble in anything else. We're essentially beta right now, and I'll let Jacob take it from there. Jacab: First of all, just want to say that the fact that we remind you of EtherScan to me is a huge compliment, because that again is absolutely what we're going for. We have been doing some redesigns lately that have kind of we think have helped display some of the information that we think people will be interested in a little more easily readable, I guess, than what it was before. So we're mainly focused on that and again, making it more easily readable. We're kind of thinking about if we were going to refresh some of the pages, what people would want to see, what we would want to see as users and how to best display that information and show people account balance information over time. I know one of the things that we added is Secret got listed. We started to add the price and show data both in US dollars as well as in Secret. And I know like most of the other explorers in the space don't really do that, at least the ones we've seen in Secret Network. And so we've been trying to work on stuff like that. Secret contracts are a big thing that we're going to be adding support for. We've already got the ability to Secret contract executions and some of the stuff around there, but we're going to be adding more purpose built pages for those contracts so that people can see for individual contracts how many times somebody is interacted with this. Obviously, they won't be able to see exactly what's gone on or like how much somebody has put into that. But they'll at least be able to see how much value is locked in that Secret contract and some of the other stuff around that. And we're also going to be adding support for people to be able to use their ledger or Kepler to create Secret contracts or interact with them on the blockchain. Anna: It looks like you have a very detailed roadmap. Could you tell us a little bit how do you work on that product flow and how you shape your roadmap? Because every time when you ask someone how you do this, they can tell you a story behind it and how you discover new things and how you decide it's super interesting for me. Could you tell us a little bit about it? Jacab: Sure. So our products process is ever evolving for a while. We've been using Pivotal Tracker as kind of our ticket flow tracker for a while. And that's something I'm very familiar with. So it was easy for me to get into and Ian picked it up pretty quickly as well. And typically he will create a ticket and we'll go back and forth a couple of times on requirements for that ticket. And then Pivotal Tracker allows you to put those tickets into sprints and kind of estimate how long each one is going to take. So I'll go through and estimate how long I think each one is going to take. And that allows us to determine, OK, we should be able to get this amount of work done in the next month so we can give people not deadlines, but expected completion dates for things. So one of the newer things that we've started doing very recently, actually, I think last night was the first time we really used this, but Ian has been going into how much Photoshop type application you're using, Ian, but he'll go through and make renders and Figma. And so that will give me an idea of, OK, I need to redesign this page and these to look like this. And that's been very helpful because before it was, well, maybe we can move this over here and over here. And it was all like verbal requirements. And I had to kind of guess as to how things should look. And then adjust from there. But that's typically our process. Ian: It's definitely ever evolving, like he says. We're getting more honed in now, for sure. I think things are going to be a lot faster now that like wire frames are being done. But yeah, it's verbatim what he said pretty much. And we're ever evolving, but we're trying to hone in on something that that we can do stably for the foreseeable future. Citizen Web3: I really hope that you guys succeed in what you guys are doing. One thing that does pop to mind, obviously, somebody who goes on to puzzle report or if you go into, I'm not sure if there is actually other explorers for the secret network, but let's not mention them because obviously we have the best one here. Ian: There's a big dipper instance running. Citizen Web3: Oh, come on. You just you just don't want to pass. Anna: We just told you in the. Ian: Cashman is behind that and he's an awesome guy. So there's there's another one. Citizen Web3: So the question I had was it's obviously that you're validator. It's hard not to notice that the secret nodes validator is a number one spot. First question I have, how did it happen? What was the success story behind becoming the top validator for the network? Ian: Well, it sure was a wild ride. I would credit it mostly to the fact that our community is very battle tested. We've gone through good times and bad times and Secret Nodes org has been there for all of it. So no matter what's going on, we've always been building and working to push things forward and just really just focused on pushing things forward. The swap was something for a long time that people didn't necessarily have faith in. Even some of the longtime community members, they just didn't think it was ever going to happen. So there was a scenario for a period of time where people they have these E and G tokens and they're just kind of screwed or something. They weren't going to be able to trade it for Secret. There was people that thought Secret would never be listed. And we had Community Churn and now we're seeing Community Growth because essentially we got through that. The swap happened as promised. It took a while to build, which is part of what made people nervous. But an interesting scenario played out where the token wasn't listed and we raised a community spend proposal to pay to build the swap. But people were getting paid in something that wasn't listed anywhere. So it's not like the people that built the swap were all full time working on the swap. People have bills and responsibilities and jobs. So it did take a bit longer. But once it came out, I think that just really flipped a few things. It definitely changed a lot of minds from people that were thinking it wasn't going to happen and we were the proposers behind it. So I think that contributed a lot to it. And then the fact that we raised another community spend proposal for building Puzzle Report and then we built it. And not only did we build it, we don't one by one feature say, hey, we need this much money from the pool. Somebody needs to pay for this feature. Let's add it. Let's do a voting process. All that we don't do that. We raised once and now we build and our product is Puzzle. That's the product we're going to keep building it. It doesn't really directly generate us any money and that's OK with us. It indirectly does, I guess, if you want to support Puzzle and delegate to us. We don't have hard data that supports what the correlation between those things are. So I really just think it's our focus. We built a product and now we're going to keep building it. We're not going to stop. Jacab: Yeah, I absolutely agree. I do think that the biggest part of the reason that we are the number one validator is that Ian has been a huge person in the community for a very long time, basically, since the beginning, but obviously having a block explorer helps with our reputation in the community. And we try to make sure that we provide what people ask for. We actually started a committee recently so that the members of the community have a way to influence what we build next and how we build it and come to us with things that they don't like about Puzzle or that they want us to focus more on and that's gone really well so far. We've only had a couple meetings, but we've had pretty good participation so far. And we're just hoping to continue doing that. And I think that eventually we might run out of ideas for Puzzle and have to just focus on making things more stable. But we're not planning on stopping development until we're absolutely completely exhausted, every single idea that we could think of. And obviously that probably won't happen for a long time. Ian: Until we are the ether skin of Cosmo. Jacab: Absolutely. Citizen Web3: You know what I like about what you guys just said and I'm sure that anybody who has been slightly longer than five minutes into crypto and you don't actually have to be into crypto to love what you said for the reason. I think personally to me that matters is that actually it turns out that Puzzle report isn't just build like a regular product where there is somebody who ordered it and then there's the supply, whatever. This is the community who ordered it kind of thing. I mean, you guys came up with the idea, you went there, you did a community spend. They supported it. Like you said, there's some kind of a committee now even. I think that's amazing. I think that's like the core kind of the heart to everything that crypto stands for. To me personally, because I mean, we have a cyber as well, where we're doing a consensus computer and we base a lot around the community and we try to base a lot on governance and I know how hard it is. And the fact that you guys have done that and you know, you managed to do that. And you're doing that. I think that that's really good as for that really. Honestly, I think it's amazing and I'm sure that you will succeed. One question, which is going to be a little bit of devil's advocate question. I had a few, but I'm going to narrow it down to one. Because it kind of has to do with security a little bit and you will see what I'm talking about here now being the number one validator and securing the network is a very important thing. And we know that especially in post networks, essentialization of stake is a very big issue. But in terms of just simple being the top validator, what are your thoughts on decentralizing, voting power and securing the security stake? How are you guys approaching that? Do you guys think that yours at top validators should take any precautions for that to happen? Ian: Some great context for this question is that we actually used to be 30 percent of the voting power on the network and that's a risky amount. And when that happened, I just mirrored what I saw in the early days of my experience in proof of work mining. I went out and I said, hey, people, please delegate to these other nodes. And other nodes grew and whatnot. And they're still growing. And I think our answer to what your real question here is for us, our answer is what we call the puzzle set. And the puzzle set is going to be a set of validators on the secret network. Maybe other networks eventually. But initially on the secret network that if you delegate to all these validators, some amount, then special features get unlocked for you on Puzzle Report. So like more advanced analytics, maybe. We haven't finalized what those features are going to be, but we have plenty of features that other people charge for like tax reporting stuff. Those are things that like Hubble, for example, they charge projects to add those to the project. Or I think they have like a prime dashboard that gives you some of that. There are other companies out there that give some of these things, but they charge for it. We're going to have a tier where certain features are given away for free to people who delegate to the set. And that's our tangible plan for contributing to decentralization. We also do a lot of work with other validators. And we do our best to promote them as well and support them in their efforts. So we're not just gunning for all the delegations. That's not our goal. And we really actually do care about decentralization. We definitely don't want to have so much of the voting power that if our node goes down or something that the network halts or is in danger. And we were approaching that at 30 percent. Jacab: I would agree with that. I mean, I think early on for me, because I didn't really have a whole lot of experience in proof of stake networks before Ian called me earlier this year. I was a little threatened whenever I saw our percentage of the network go down. But now that I kind of understand that that does promote decentralization, that it's actually better for the network in general and for us. Therefore, if we don't have as much of the voting power, I started to kind of reverse my decisions and understand that it's better for it to be more evenly distributed. So now we typically when people ask like, oh, who do I delegate to? We typically say, oh, you know, delegate to all these other nodes. And if you want to delegate to us as well, that's great. But make sure that you spread your delegations around. Don't just delegate to one person or to one validator. Citizen Web3: I like the idea with special features getting unlocked when you delegate to certain set of validators. I mean, I can think of straight away like gamification ideas, but OK, let's leave it to you. I love that. It's a great idea. Guys, do you want to add anything that we didn't ask? I mean, we do have one more question, traditional question, but do you guys want to add anything that maybe we forgot to ask? Ian: You forgot to ask us to shill our product more. Citizen Web3: Go on, shill it. God, this is the perfect time to do that. Ian: I mean, really what I would shill is the committee. We are opening up our like the accessibility to how we determine priorities, how we implement features, and people have already surfaced like bugs and things that they want to be improved. And we're going to get more efficient with like how our process works. But we've had a fair turnaround time on actually making those changes, make it into the product. So honestly, we're going to be thoughtful about what we add. But at the end of the day, there is an opportunity for people to shape this product by showing up to the committee calls and or just the puzzle room on the puzzle channel on Discord for the secret network. And yeah, we're very active with responding and we will not ignore you. Citizen Web3: The best way to get participating in the committee is to join the Puzzle server. Right. OK, cool. Ian: Discord So that's chat.scrt .network. Citizen Web3: We will definitely add that as well to that. I didn't know you guys had a Discord and actually would have went on it and pretended to have some trying to get some secret information before the interview. But now I do. But OK, cool. Anna, do you want to ask the traditional question? Anna: Oh, yeah. That's the question about the projects that inspired you recently in any space, except secret network, of course. I mean, in blockchain space. Ian: So into the block is definitely getting us a lot of inspiration because Etherscan touts themselves as like on the bottom of their website, they tout themselves as a block explorer and analytics platform. And I think that's very true. But I don't think they really lean very deeply into the analytics compared to what they could do and compared to the great work that you see from into the block. That's where we draw a lot of our inspiration from. When it comes to like UI enhancements and stuff, we don't have UI UX designers. So we pull a lot of our inspiration from other explorers. And we think it's really important that we do that because users already know how to use and understand those things. So like if we can thoughtfully implement best practices and I have like a whole list of explorers in Cosmos, there's some of them. There's only a very small slices of features that were inspired by others. There's more, but lots of market research on how other people are displaying the information. We recently updated how our account page shows account balances and that's inspired by the Big Dipper stuff. I think they already do it great. I don't think we need to reinvent the wheel fully or anything like that. Anna: So cool. Thank you. Jacab: I think you covered most of the ones that I was going to say. You know, I think Big Dipper, Etherscan obviously is a huge inspiration for us. I really like an orchid token, their project with making a decentralized BP. I think it's really cool. Citizen Web3: Cool. Thanks, guys. Guys, it's been a huge pleasure chatting to you. And I'm really hoping that in the not so distant future, maybe next year, which is not that far away, we can have a we can have another chat with the development of the Explorer and see where you guys are, of course, if you're going to be up for it. And again, for anyone who is listening, guys, check past report, check out the links. Join the Discord channel, like the guys say, get involved in the committee. And for anyone tuning in, thank you for listening and thanks, everybody. So guys, catch you later next time. Jacab: Yeah, thanks for having us. Ian: Thanks for having us on. Anna: Thank you. Bye. Outro: This content was created by the citizen web3 validator if you enjoyed it please support us by delegating on citizenweb3.com/staking and help us create more educational content.